Course adjustments.

Well, I feel like the cover and title I chose for "The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murders: Blood of the Succubus" didn't work out. I mean, they may have nothing to do with it. Maybe the whole thing didn't work.

But I'm going to go ahead and change the title to "Blood of the Succubus: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murders," and go with the red silhouette cover. (Which got by far the most votes anyway.)

I don't believe this will confuse anyone.

I'd also like to do a better job of entering the title. I have only one category for instance, and I'm supposed to have two. Maybe change the synopsis slightly.

Meanwhile, I've written an entire book under the assumption that it was going to be called Fairy Punk. A comment someone made about the word "Fairy" at the last writer's group about the connotation for that word made me rethink it. Not so much because of that but because I'd already been thinking about it. It just started not feeling right.

So I came up with a bunch of other titles:

Faerypunk. (One word. I like this--but I already have a title called Faerylander, so I think that would be confusing.)

Faery Punk.

Faerie Punk.

And the original, Fairy Punk.

I put these up to a vote on Facebook and Faerie Punk won going away. So I've gone back to the cover artist and asked him to change it. Also, I'll have to change the term Fairy throughout the manuscript to Faerie. (I know there is a way to do that on Word, but I can't remember. Lara can probably do it for me.)

I'm still trying to figure this all out.

One of the reasons I'm doing both changes is that I don't want to become known as a gimmicky author. I mean, I'm quirky, I admit that. But it isn't a trick to get people to buy my books, it's just the way my brain works.

But I've got werewolves and the Donner Party, and I've got Bigfoot and the Gold Rush, and I've got superintelligent pigs called Tuskers, and so on.

I think having titles like Tuskers, The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murders, and now Faerie Punk may look like I don't write serious books, which in effect I do. I mean I'm not going for the humor though I hope there is some there.

So I need to rethink how I approach this. I get way too many Pig jokes as it is. It makes me a little uneasy, you know?

Most of my books are meant (by me) to be taken seriously, but because of the subject matter and perhaps the titles, I think people approach them differently than is intended. I tend to get a lot of "surprising good" comments, which I think is a reflection of them finding that it wasn't a gimmick but an actual book.

But really, is that where I want to start? Maybe I need to take myself more seriously.